Hashim Thaçi and the rest of the
Kosovar political elite are frustrating investigations into murder,
kidnapping, and trafficking in human organs.
The Albanians of Kosovo — the Kosovars — revere the United
States of America. They also gaze with longing eyes upon their richest
near-neighbor, the European Union.
And with good reason. The United States and its European NATO allies,
after all, carried out the 1999 bombing campaign that wrenched Kosovo
from Serbia, and effectively gave it to the 1.7 million Kosovars who
comprise about 93 percent of the country’s population. The U.S. and EU
member-states delivered the diplomatic clout that resulted in the
Republic of Kosovo’s recognition as an independent state by over 100
countries. They have also, along with American and European NGOs, given
the Kosovars impressive amounts of financial, legal, and economic
assistance. Now the Kosovars are seeking a lifting of EU visa
restrictions, which would allow them to travel freely in Europe, as well
as the conclusion of a Stabilization and Association Agreement with the
EU, which would set their country on course for EU membership.
Given the support Kosovo has received, and the warmth ordinary
Kosovars hold in their hearts for Washington and Brussels, any Kosovar
leader who jeopardizes the country’s relationship with the U.S. or who
acts in ways that retard or halt Kosovo’s integration with Europe is
clearly risking a sharp political or popular backlash, or worse.
And yet, according to diplomats who have worked in the Balkans for
decades but who spoke only with assurances that they would remain
anonymous, the Kosovo Albanians’ most-powerful leaders are on the brink
of inflicting unprecedented damage on Kosovo’s relations with the U.S.
and the EU. The foremost of these individuals, the diplomats said, is
Hashim Thaçi, Kosovo’s former prime minister, now its foreign minister
and deputy PM. He is the country’s most-powerful public figure.
* * *
Thaçi and other members of Kosovo’s political elite who have been named in Western
intelligence reports
as organized-crime figures are, the diplomats say, sacrificing the best
interests of the Republic of Kosovo and the Kosovars in order to
protect themselves from criminal prosecution.
They are doing so by defying efforts by Washington and Brussels to
establish a special court to undertake prosecutions stemming from
allegations that Thaçi and other commanders and soldiers of the Kosovo
Albanian insurgency — the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) — were involved
in about 400 cases of kidnapping, forced displacement, illegal
imprisonment, and murder after NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999.
These Kosovar leaders, the diplomats say, have effectively plied
their influence to prevent Kosovo’s parliament from passing a
legislative package, including constitutional amendments, that would
allow for the special court’s establishment.
“If this doesn’t pass, United States relations with this Kosovo
government and future Kosovo governments will deteriorate,” said one
Western diplomat, referring to the legislative package on the court.
“The United States wants to demonstrate the depth of its commitment to
have these allegations heard in a credible process.”
Any such deterioration would mark a sea change in a friendly
relationship that began more than a quarter-century ago, when Serbia’s
strongman, Slobodan Milošević, rose to power and resorted to wholesale
violence to quash Kosovo’s autonomy within the former socialist
Yugoslavia’s Republic of Serbia.
“We are all speaking with the same voice, including all the visitors
who come from Brussels to discuss changes to the visa regulations and
the Stabilization and Association Agreement,” said another diplomat who
has represented his European country in Kosovo for years.
A U.S. warning
The victims of the alleged kidnappings and murders in 1999 and 2000
were mostly members of Kosovo’s Serb, Roma, and other minority groups;
but these victims also included a significant number of Albanians who
were fingered as Serb “collaborators” or who ran afoul of the KLA’s
commanders in other ways. Investigators have accumulated evidence
showing that several of the murders were linked with the sale for profit
of their victims’ organs, but are still working to amass sufficient
evidence to bring indictments against individuals suspected of being
involved.
European Union officials as well as diplomats from the U.S. and EU
member-states said the special court stands to benefit Kosovo’s people,
because it will at the very least clear the air of the allegations
hanging over dominant members of the government. The court, the
diplomats added, might also contribute to a desperately needed cleansing
of corrupt officials whose activities stifle the growth of Kosovo’s
economy.
The special court would nominally be located in Kosovo and would
operate under Kosovo’s own laws. But the court would have foreign
prosecutors, judges, and staff and conduct its trials outside Kosovo.
Holding such proceedings in the country would expose court officials
and, more critically, prospective witnesses and their family members, to
violence and intimidation. Gangland killings and intimidation of
diplomats are hardly unusual in Kosovo; and the Kosovars’ traditional
practice of blood vengeance, which demands retaliation even against
family members of a violator, still trumps Western-style rule of law.
The latest U.S. warning to Thaçi and other members of Kosovo’s
government and assembly came on July 12, when a senior State Department
official vigorously urged Kosovar leaders to effect the constitutional
changes by August 1. During a series of heated meetings in the country’s
capital, Priština, Assistant Secretary of State for European and
Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland informed Kosovar leaders, including
Thaçi and another former KLA commander and former prime minister, Ramush
Haradinaj, that a failure to meet the deadline would result in
“consequences” she did not specify, said a Kosovo-based source who spoke
on condition of anonymity due to the risks entailed in divulging such
information.
* * *
Diplomats and officials from the U.S. and the
European Union states have repeatedly informed Kosovar leaders that, if
they fail to see to the adoption of the amendments, the U.S. would
neither veto nor otherwise block the establishment, by the United
Nations Security Council, of a special UN criminal court to hear the
cases.
Placing the criminal cases under the jurisdiction of the UN —
something Russia has demanded for years — could endanger the Republic of
Kosovo’s international standing. It would create an opening for Serbia,
which is close to Vladimir Putin’s Russia and has never surrendered
sovereignty over Kosovo, to frustrate Kosovo’s wider acceptance as a
sovereign state. Kosovo has yet to secure UN membership: Russia and
China, permanent members of the Security Council, refuse to recognize
its independence. Five EU member-states—Slovakia, Romania, Greece,
Cyprus and Spain, with separatist fears of their own—also refuse to
recognize the country.
Thaçi is behaving like a caged animal” — an international official in Priština
Despite these warnings and despite explicit and repeated assurances
by Kosovar leaders that the required constitutional changes would pass,
Kosovo’s assembly thumbed its nose at the U.S. and EU on June 26 by
voting down the amendments.
Thaçi — who for years was the go-to guy in Kosovo for American,
European, and UN officials — has religiously expressed public support
for the special court and claims to be pressuring recalcitrant deputies
in his own party to vote for the amendments.
It’s one thing to say he supports the court, but the fact is he’s the
one man in Priština who can make it happen, and and it hasn’t. Western
diplomats speculate that his outward support is political theater and
that Thaçi is working behind the scenes — intimidating members of his
own political party — to delay the court’s establishment for as long as
possible. Is this, diplomats wonder, because he fears being indicted?
Delaying the court’s formation would — through the further loss by
attrition of witnesses to crimes committed 16 years ago — weaken the
evidence a prosecutor might bring against him and other potential
accused.
“Thaçi is behaving like a caged animal,” said a senior representative
in Priština for a major international organization. “Kosovo’s people
would be happy to be rid of him, but they don’t know how to be rid of
him. Thaçi controls the government and economic life. There is no chance
for new, young leaders to emerge. There is no hope for new businesses
to succeed.”
A significant number of opposition members of Kosovo’s assembly,
including members of Haradinaj’s AAK party, voted against the
amendments. Western diplomats in Priština question whether these
assembly members, like Thaçi, fear being arrested, tried, and sentenced
to lengthy jail terms.
Since decisive nay votes on the constitutional measures are coming
from both Thaçi’s PDK party, which dominates the Kosovo’s present
government, and from opposition parties, diplomats said that a resulting
deterioration in Kosovo’s relations with the U.S. would affect future
Kosovo governments of any party until such time as the court is
established.
A former Western diplomat, who worked for years in Priština, said the
U.S. would clearly not turn its back on Kosovo entirely or abandon
efforts to strengthen rule of law in the country. But Washington would
likely stop encouraging American and other Western investors to do
business in Kosovo and might cease advocating for the country’s
recognition by other states and for Kosovo’s further integration into
the European Union.
“I do not count on the assembly passing the constitutional
amendments,” the former diplomat said. “Thaçi announced that he will not
bring the measure to the assembly unless he is sure that he has the
votes for it to pass. This effectively means that he does not have the
votes, or doesn’t want to have the votes.”
“I don’t rule out Thaçi finding some excuse to kick it down the
road,” the former diplomat continued, speculating that there might be an
attempt to delay further the special court’s formation by referring the
matter to Kosovo’s constitutional court.
Some Western diplomats and analysts from international organizations say that
recent armed clashes
between KLA “separatists” and special police in Macedonia, as well as a
sudden, surprising surge in the number of illegal Kosovar migrants
delivered by people smugglers to Hungary’s border with Serbia in
February might have been warnings from Kosovo’s underworld leaders to
the EU of what the havoc they can cause the EU if Brussels does not back
off on the court issue.
* * *
Assertions that KLA leaders were involved in a spate
of kidnappings and murders and other grave crimes after the NATO
bombing campaign in 1999 were first aired in 2008 with the publication
in Italy of “
La Caccia,” the memoirs of the former UN war crimes prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, which I co-authored.
At Russia’s behest, the Council of Europe, in 2009, launched an
investigation under Dick Marty — a former state prosecutor from
Switzerland and a member of the Council’s Parliamentary Assembly — to
examine the assertions made in
La Caccia. Marty’s
report
named Thaçi as the leader of organized criminal enterprises that
flourished in Kosovo and Albania from 1999, and implicated him in
kidnappings, murders, and organ-trafficking operations that claimed the
lives of Serbs, Roma, Albanians, and persons from other ethnic groups,
some of whom were abducted in Kosovo, transported across the border to
secret detention camps in Albania, and eventually killed.
After Marty released his findings, the U.S. and the EU organized,
under EU auspices, a special criminal-investigation unit to develop
evidence and decide whether there were sufficient grounds to press
criminal charges.
In July 2014, the special investigation’s chief prosecutor, Clint
Williamson — a former United States ambassador-at-large for war crimes
and one of the drafters of the criminal indictment against Milošević by
the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague — announced that his team had
procured enough evidence to support indictments against senior KLA
members. The charges Williamson listed included unlawful killing,
abduction, illegal detention, sexual violence, forced displacement of
individuals from their homes and communities, and the desecration and
destruction of religious sites.
“The evidence is compelling that these crimes were not the acts of
rogue individuals acting on their own accord, but rather that they were
conducted in an organized fashion and were sanctioned by certain
individuals in the top levels of the KLA leadership,” Mr. Williamson
wrote in
a statement outlining
the investigation’s results. The evidence and detailed findings are
sealed until a court is established to hear the cases.
Mogherini, Clinton write Thaçi
Western diplomats, including individuals at ambassadorial level, have
said that Thaçi has engaged high-price foreign legal advisers and
lobbyists, who have informed him that the push for establishment of the
court has been the work of “low-ranking” individuals in the State
Department and did not have the backing of officials in the department’s
top offices.
The United States and European countries knew 10 years
ago that Thaçi and his men were engaged in drug smuggling and creating a
mafia state” — a European ambassador
Yet the prosecution effort has had the public support of Lady
Catherine Ashton of the United Kingdom, until late 2014 the EU’s High
Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy; her present
successor, Federica Mogherini of Italy; the former U.S. secretary of
state, Hillary Clinton, now a front-running candidate for president; and
a staunch supporter of Kosovo’s independence, Vice President Joseph
Biden, who wrote a letter to Thaçi exhorting him to cooperate with the
investigation.
According to Council of Europe investigator Marty’s findings,
European intelligence agencies were reporting in the mid-2000s that
Thaçi and his allies were exploiting their position in Kosovo’s
government and, by 2010, had amassed personal wealth totally out of
proportion to their declared employment.
“The sad thing is that the United States and European countries knew
10 years ago that Thaçi and his men were engaged in drug smuggling and
creating a mafia state,” said a European ambassador who has followed the
Balkans for decades. “The attitude was, ‘He’s a bastard, but he’s our
bastard.’”
Thaçi has for years vehemently
denied any involvement in organized crime and corruption. He has
scoffed at
the allegations made against him in the findings of the Council of
Europe’s investigation, which, he said, besmirched the Kosovo Liberation
Army and the memory of those fighters who gave their lives for Kosovo’s
independence. In late 2010, the press in Kosovo reported that Thaçi had
threatened to name publicly every Albanian who assisted Marty in his
investigation.
In May 2015, Thaçi voiced his support for the special court before the United Nations Security Council,
telling
the body that Kosovo’s government would back its establishment. “We
believe most of the charges are groundless,” Thaci said. Westerners who
have met Thaçi during recent weeks say he appeared to be cool and
comfortable while discussing the special court issue, and even seemed
unpleasantly surprised that the Kosovo assembly voted down the measure
on July 26.
Albanian observers and Western diplomats say Thaçi is now attempting
to demonstrate his value to the West as, among other things, an ally in
the fight against Islamic fundamentalist terrorism.
Another former ambassador from a Western European country said the
corruption and organized crime activities in Kosovo include
transportation of illicit drugs, people smuggling, smuggling of goods,
trafficking of women for prostitution, money-laundering,
organ-trafficking, and running protection rackets. He added that the
Kosovo’s Albanian underworld works together with criminal gangs in
Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Albania, and other
countries.
Kosovo’s Albanian underworld has allegedly succeeded in
corrupting even members
of the large European Union rule of law mission in Kosovo, EULEX, which
Brussels established to investigate and prosecute cases involving
corruption, malfeasance, and organized crime.
Chuck Sudetic has followed the former Yugoslavia and its
successor states for more than three decades and covered the Yugoslav
wars from 1990 to 1995 for The New York Times. His latest book is
“Dubrovnik: In Recountings true and exact…”.
